Welcome to Taiwan Explorer

Welcome to Taiwan Explorer, your finest resource on Taiwan, with focus on travel, culture, lifestyle, and events that shape the country and its people. You can also follow my updates on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flipboard.

January 6, 2013

2012 just ended and I believe it's the perfect time to analyze the statistics of my blog, well, I should say blogs. As most of you know by now, My Kafkaesque life consists of three blogs. This one is the main one, reserved for my best posts, and then there's the second one with the same design and similar URL, where I publish shorter articles and make pages, and the last one is my photo blog, where I occasionally publish higher-resolution photos. Most of the time I update the main and second blog and since they look the same, I hardly take them as two separate blogs. Nevertheless, this division is useful, when I'm writing article-like posts, that are meant for googlers rather than for regular readers and it's quite beneficial to my overall traffic. If you're not into detailed stats, scroll to the bottom, you can just check the tl;dr version of my stats.

CONCLUSION: As you can see, the focus is still on my main blog when it comes to the amount of published posts, comments and subscriptions, because I choose to post the most interesting and personal articles here, while I use the other two blogs for shorter articles, photos and pages, that receive less feedback from readers, but are very beneficial for the SEO as well as enable me to enlarge my Taipei and Taiwan travel resource without losing my loyal subscribers.

Stats by Google Analytics (2010, 2011, 2012)

Let's look into some more particular stats provided by Google Analytics. I started this blog in 2008 and added the other two in late 2009, however I begun to use Google Analytics in 2010 on all three blogs, that's why I decided to compare the past 3 years on every particular blog and highlight some trends.

4. Visits by blog (column) and by year (row)

5. Average daily visits in 2012

Main blog: 643
Second blog: 479
Photo blog: 108

TOTAL:1230

6. Pageviews by blog (column) and by year (row)

7. Average daily visits in 2012

Main blog: 1238
Second blog: 2070
Photo blog: 185

TOTAL:3493

CONCLUSION: The data shows, that the main blog's visits and pageviews dropped in 2011, because I focused more on my second blog. Subsequently, the second blog doubled the visits and tripled the pageviews. In 2012 both blogs grew almost equally, the photo blog is also doing much better and doubling the growth every year. It's interesting, that the second blog has less visits than the main, but more pageviews, because of all the travel related pages are found there.

CONCLUSION: In the recent 3 years, when I started to write more about traveling to Taiwan, I attracted a lot of readers from Singapore. I used to live there for a while and I know how much people love Taiwan, so it's not a big surprise. Singaporeans like to organize individual customized trips and young people prefer English resources - I guess my blog is perfect for them. If I only look at 2012 visits by country Taiwan has dethroned Singapore and is no my no. 1 now, but by a small margin.

CONCLUSION: Traffic from mobile devices is truly on the rise since 2010 and most of this is driven by Apple's iOS devices, which constitute 84% of all my mobile traffic - that's impressive. Nevertheless, most of my visitors come from desktop OS and prefer the traditional way of reading blogs. With that said, I'm still trying to optimize my blog for a good mobile experience.

CONCLUSION: This list shows, that my most popular posts are related to Taipei and Taiwan, especially those that relate to travel planning. I will definitely focus more on that in the future. My pages are highly popular, because they centralize my information. I'm constantly working on improving that for my readers.

My blog stats: tl;dr version

If you're not into checking all those stats in detail, here is a tl;dr version, a brief summary of all the data above.

• I've written 1,351 posts so far and received 12,077 comments.
• My main blog has 285 subscribers, my second one has 76.
• I had around 450,000 visits to my blogs in 2012, that's a 63% increase from 2011.
• On average I had 1,230 visits per day or around 37,500 visits per month in 2012.
• I had close to 1.3 million pageviews in 2012, that's a 61% increase from 2011.
• On average I had 3,493 pageviews per day or around 106,500 per month in 2012.
• Most of my traffic came from Taiwan, USA and Singapore in 2012.
• 92% of my traffic comes from desktop, Windows is dominating.
• 8% of my traffic comes from mobile, iOS is dominating, iPad is the top device.
• My most popular post of all times is Visit Taipei in English.
• My most popular page of all times is List of Night Markets in Taiwan
• My most popular post in 2012 was Is Jeremy Lin Taiwanese or Chinese?

2012 was the best blogging year so far according to this data, but that's just one way to look at it. What matters most is that I'm having fun and enjoying to share my thoughts, travel escapades and photos. My blog is my main creative outlet and no social media can replace that. One that comes close to that is Instagram, you can check my photos here. My blogging plans for this year include finishing the Taipei travel resource, better utilizing social media and monetizing my blog. I also want to collaborate more with my wife and allow guest posts. Thank you, if you're following my blog and reading my posts regularly, I appreciate it, you're part of my blog's success. And do say hi from time to time, I'd appreciate it. Cheers!

4 comments:

Extremely interesting, and impressive numbers. Would you mind going into a little more details as to why splitting up your content into multiple blogs is helpful SEO-wise? And did it never lead to any confusion on the readers'side?

@Anonymous: Hola! ¿Qué onda? :) I don't know, but you must be the first one that came out and let me know. I'm happy you like it :)

@Klaus: It's beneficial, because these blogs are interlinked and constantly act as referral sources. But what is more important is that I can decide what kind of post I write on which one. I started with this idea way before Blogger had the option of individual pages, because I believed that I want to index my content and offer an easy way to navigate through my content, but not disturb the readers on my main blog (my blog was more vibrant in 2009/2010 when it comes to comments). I now have around 50 pages, but I mostly update 10 of them, the one about Taiwan and Taipei. Basically I transformed my blog from an interactive blog with little traffic to an SEO optimized resource with less comments. I'm fine with that, because social media serves as the platform, where I interact. It also helps my SEO, that people link to me from websites like Trip Advisor and travel related forums (especially in Singapore). I think even if I stop blogging today, the traffic will keep growing, the resource (and I believe quality of info) is what it makes Google constantly redirect searches to my blog. At this point, I'd rather merge the two identical blogs and have my own domain, but I'm lazy to do so. It would be too much work. And since Blogger is Google's and the my stuff is easy to be found, I feel no urge to do so now. I know some people changed to a personal domain and traffic has fallen.